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27.11.2008
I’m still on a Bolano kick; now I’m reading By Night in Chile, a swirl of the dying thoughts of a priest and literary critic. Like Amulet, its real subject seems to be literature. But where Amulet presented literature as a source of sustenance, By Night in Chile tends to present it as a disappointment. The peculiarly fluid immortality literature offers (not of individual works or of reputations, but of a kind of intergenerational feeding, a continuity of voices) is the ultimate ideal in Amulet. To the priest in By Night in Chile, the same ideal appears hazy and inadequate, a convulsion of shadows.
At the moment, though, what interests me is the fact that, in both Bolano novels I’ve read so far, the protagonist is an observer of writers rather than a writer him or herself. Auxilio in Amulet is a kind of bohemian hanger-on with a vocation for tending to young poets; Sebastian in By Night mentions his own poetry, but is mainly concerned with refracting other people’s works. I tend to believe that this is to Bolano’s credit. When so many novels resort to the narcissistic (and desperately unimaginative) tack of making the protagonist a writer, too, and thus an obvious stand-in for the author, it’s lovely to see someone choose protagonists that offer, not an occasion for self-absorption, but a vehicle for the contemplation of others. Bolano is fervently interested in literature as a force larger than himself, in how it moves and functions.
He’s keenly aware that almost all writers, even the famous ones, are ultimately dissolved by the flood of other voices. The question present in these two novels is whether it’s correct to regard that dissolution as ecstatic or degrading. Auxilio’s passionate immersion in a literary floating world of nighttime cafes and dying painters suggests a willingness to disappear in voices not her own. Sebastian is positioned at more of a remove, as a friend of other critics and of the already-famous (Neruda figures) and also in his position as a priest, a celibate, and a participant in right-wing politics. He reveals the queasy suspicion that underlines Auxilio’s affirmations: that literature does not provide transcendence, but instead is only a kind of malfunctioning life-support system. He wants to be saved, where Auxilio asks only to be lost.
By Night in Chile is even more deliriously beautiful than Amulet (I’ll post an excerpt soon) but somewhat less engaging, probably because of its narrator’s refusal of belief.
November 30th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
[…] For commentary on the first half of this book, see the previous post… […]